An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: An auto dealer software company is pitching AI-powered kiosks designed to replace car salesmen on showroom floors. Automotive News says the industry is "skeptical." But be honest -- would you really rather deal with the average car lot shark than a computer?

Epikar, a South Korean company that cooks up digital management solutions for car dealers, has named its new AI invention the Pikar Genie. The idea is that customers can talk to this device, ask it product questions, and basically do everything you'd do with a car salesman except for actually closing the deal and signing paperwork. Renault, BMW, and Volvo are already using some Epikar products at South Korean dealerships, but this new customer-facing AI product is still in its infancy.

AN reported that "Renault assigns three salespeople to its Seoul showroom enhanced with Epikar automation compared with six for other Renault showrooms in South Korea," according to Epikar CEO Bosuk Han. The company's now looking to expand into America and is apparently already testing its products at at least one dealership stateside. Car-dealer consultant Fleming Ford (Director of Strategic Growth at NCM Associates) said U.S. dealerships "aren't ready for fully automated showrooms."

"The showroom isn't just where you buy a car," Automotive News quoted him saying. "It's where you decide who to trust to help you to choose the right car."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and the Oscar-winning film One Battle After Another are grim parables of today. But they are not without hope

As Margaret Atwood has said, all dystopian fiction is “really about now”. No wonder the genre is flourishing. This week Atwood’s bleak vision of a future America as a patriarchal theocracy returned to TV screens with the adaptation of her prize-winning 2019 novel The Testaments, the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, set in a chillingly recognisable militarised America, swept the Oscars last month.

Back in 1984 when Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, she feared that its central premise – that the US could be transformed from a liberal democracy into Gilead, a theocratic dictatorship after a coup – was too outrageous to convince readers. She need not have worried. By the time the novel was made into the award-winning TV series in 2017, it was all too believable. Arriving just after Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and the rollback of women’s rights, the show felt made for the moment. Atwood was hailed as a prophet. The red-and-white handmaid robes became a symbol of female defiance across the globe. “For a long time we were going away from Gilead and then we turned around and started going back,” Atwood said of her decision to write a follow-up more than 30 years later.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Continue reading...

Deal for resident doctors was in sight when sudden change by ministers forced latest action, says Jack Fletcher

Ministers killed the chance to end strikes by resident doctors when they suddenly reduced the amount of money they were offering to secure the peace deal, the doctors’ leader claims.

Dr Jack Fletcher accused the government of “playing games” and forcing resident doctors to embark on their 15th strike over pay and jobs, which is disrupting the NHS this week.

Continue reading...

It is the voting public in Israel that will settle their PM’s fate later this year. But all they have heard are promises of ‘total victory’ that prove to be hollow

It is a record of abject failure. I am not speaking of Donald Trump, though I could be. Instead, I am talking about his partner in this terrible war.

Naturally, Trump has been the star of the show. He has been the face of the 40-day war on Iran, whether dialling up the threats against the country in foul, bloodthirsty language – “a whole civilisation will die tonight” – or announcing on his own social media platform a two-week ceasefire and the talks that are supposed to begin this weekend in Islamabad. But Trump has had an ally at his side, who only now is entering the spotlight. That ally is Benjamin Netanyahu.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Continue reading...

Always wondered what everyday stuff celebrities buy, where they shop for food, and the basic they scrimp on? The interiors guru talks museum shops, sake and loft insulation with the Filter

• Don’t get the Filter delivered to your inbox? Sign up here

Michelle Ogundehin, former editor-in-chief of Elle Decoration magazine, is the head judge on the BBC’s Interior Design Masters and co-host of Grand Designs: House of the Year. She trained as an architect and also works as a commentator and consultant, as well as being a trustee of the Design Museum.

Her bestselling first book, Happy Inside, explores how home shapes health and happiness; her forthcoming book (spring 2027), Your Powerful Home: 4 Steps to a Home that Heals, looks at your home as a partner in your wellbeing, an ethos she shares through her Happy Insiders Club, which offers guided monthly coaching.

Continue reading...

Coveted £20 accessory to be marketed as part of sequel’s ticket deal – and is already being touted for resale from £130

In a recent trailer for the highly anticipated The Devil Wears Prada sequel, the cast are seen parading through the streets of New York City carrying an array of designer handbags, including clutches and satchels from Chanel and Valentino.

But among fans of the film there is a very different type of It bag in demand: a popcorn bucket shaped to resemble a structured tote bag is quickly becoming a coveted accessory.

Continue reading...

Melania Trump made a surprise appearance at the White House on Thursday to announce that she ‘never had a relationship’ with the late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. Her address has seemingly put Epstein back on the political agenda when focus had been firmly on the US and Israel’s war in Iran. The intervention came at a difficult time for her husband, Donald Trump, as the fragile ceasefire agreed between the US and Iran seemed to be at risk of falling apart, and as US lawmakers are raising the alarm over the president’s mental stability. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian US editor, Betsy Reed

Continue reading...

Drummer who brought an irresistible melting pot of styles to hits by Marvin Gaye, Gloria Gaynor and the Jackson 5

In R&B, soul, funk, disco and other forms of African-American popular music, no performer is more valuable than the drummer who can find “the pocket”: the name given by musicians to that elusive place where the rhythm propelling a song is both profound and irresistible. James Gadson, who has died aged 86, seemed to live his entire working life deep in that pocket, giving momentum to such 1970s hits as Bill Withers’ Lean on Me, Marvin Gaye’s I Want You, Diana Ross’s Love Hangover, the Jackson 5’s Dancing Machine, Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, Smokey Robinson’s Cruisin’, Peaches & Herb’s Reunited and many more in future decades during his career in the recording studios of Los Angeles.

Other artists in related fields also made grateful use of his gifts. He played on Boz Scaggs’ Slow Dancer (1974) and Elkie Brooks’s Live and Learn (1979), Leonard Cohen’s The Future (1992) and, in this century, Rickie Lee Jones’s The Evening of My Best Day, Paul McCartney’s Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, Lana Del Rey’s Paradise, and several albums by Beck, among others.

Continue reading...

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Tot nu toe kon het ons allemaal redelijk aan onze respectievelijke reet roesten met Trump, de naar de hel geknalde olieraffinaderijen en de Straat van Hormuz. Nu heeft RTV Noord echter een redacteur naar de kermis in Meerstad gestuurd en die ontdekte iets waar we van schrikken. De BOTSAUTO'S zijn in GEVAAR. Kermisondernemers trekken van stad naar stad en zijn voor de stroomvoorziening vaak afhankelijk van agreggaten dus DAT LOOPT IN DE CENTEN. Zoals kermisondernemer Martin Hulzebos zegt: 'Dan bestaat het risico dat een ritje in de botsauto te duur wordt voor sommigen.' Onze favoriete plek om met tokkies te knokken VERDWIJNT. De zweefmolen wordt voor de HAPPY FEW. Het eendjes vissen wordt VOOR DE ELITE. Stop de oorlog NU. Trump, willig alle eisen van Iran ONMIDDELLIJK in. Stop de genocide. Red de botsauto's. 

LIVEBLOG IRAN HIER.

Bees That Come Out of the Ground?! "I got up-close filming and learning about ground-nesting bees. They appear in the spring are important pollinators and keystone species of their ecosystems!"

Essays on early modern game manuals, women gamers, or wordplay have you curious enough about Ringhieri & Bargagli, Sorel (v2) & La Force, or Harsdörffer & GutsMuths to learn 3 languages? On Metafilter, Memrise, RosettaStone, Mango, Babbel, FluentU, Busuu, LingQ, Yabla, Lingvist, Drops, Readlang, and Dreaming have all come up. On Reddit, r/italianlearning, r/French / r/learnfrench, and r/German / r/Germanlearning can answer questions. On YouTube, Lucrezia, Pierre, Elisa, Adeline, Nelly, Anja, Marija, and Annik make it fun. Duolingo spurs you on, and Italki offers tutors. For early modern literary goals, open textbooks or a shortcut to Wiktionary may help, and--with caveats--historical readers may too: Italian (1 2 3 4 5 6); French (1 2 3 4 5 6 etc.); German (1 2 3 4 5 6 etc.). Anyhow, "What's the ... [odd / personal] reason you decided to learn a language?"

Using wiki software, old photos, family stories, bank transactions, social media posts, and an LLM to sift through everything to build a personal encyclopedia.

Staat Feyenoord na komend weekend nog altijd tweede in de Eredivisie? Met NEC - Feyenoord op het programma is dat allerminst zeker. Feyenoord ploetert al maanden, terwijl de belangrijkste concurrent in de strijd om plek twee al het hele seizoen op een roze wolk leeft.

Firefox maker warns old web tactics are now shaping AI at the expense of user choice

Firefox-maker Mozilla is calling out Microsoft after Redmond said it would scale back some Copilot features in Windows, arguing the rollback shows the company pushed AI too far without enough regard for user choice.…

Here is all you need to know about F1's cost cap and why it has increased in 2026.

Lewis Hamilton and Ferrari have been back out on track this week to help Pirelli with some valuable development work.